


Long Way Down

by sanidine



Category: True Detective
Genre: Bruises, Canon Era, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Chocolate Box Exchange Treat, Hallucinations, Kinda, Light BDSM, M/M, Past Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-08 11:24:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17385578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanidine/pseuds/sanidine
Summary: Rivers of history inside of every human being.





	Long Way Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [[translation] Long Way Down](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17818619) by [hieroglyphics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hieroglyphics/pseuds/hieroglyphics)



> Treat fic for Chocolate Box Round 4. Your letter was too inspiring to pass up!

Rust and Marty caught the case when the second victim had been found floating in the waterways of Iberia parish, a discovery that neatly ruled out the husband who had been locked up awaiting trial for the first.

The odd  ropes that the women had been strangled with were twisted so tight that the flesh had been cut through, but autopsy showed that they had still been alive when they had gone into the water. When the third and fourth bodies turned up the ME determined from the decomp timeline that they were actually numbers two and three. It made sense. Rust remembered the scene, the canal choked with water weeds that would have obscured them from casual view. It made him wonder how many more were out there, bodies that had bloated and then deflated, and then dissolved back into the same water that their first terrestrial ancestor had crawled out if all those eons ago and had carried into the rivers of history inside of every human being.

“Hell is an ocean.” Rust said, later.

“What -” They still had most of their clothes on but Marty was already breathing hard as he leaned back. “What the fuck're you talking about?”

Instead of answering, Rust took Marty's hand from where he'd been pawing around and wrapped it around his other wrist. Marty's took hold but his fingers were loose around Rust's carpals, even when Rust held up his other hand and Marty took the hint and spread his fingers so that he could pin both of Rust's hands against the arm of the couch.

Rust stared past Marty's shoulder at the black slice in reality that he knew wasn't really there, a yawning chasm that cut through the couch and the wall andand b up into the ceiling as if it were a tear in a two dimensional picture of a room. Sharp fragments of abstract memories flickered around the edge of that velvety nothingness like bright butterflies, and if Rust could only make them settle then he knew that he could pin them together into something important. So he flexed his fingers and said

“Tighter.”

Marty obliged, barely. Even as slight as the pressure was, it was enough to get Rust's blood pumping faster and his face must have looked some particular kind of way because Marty stopped and asked “Isn't this gonna hurt you?”

Rust shrugged. A careful shrug, slight enough not to dislodge Marty's hesitant grasp. He said “Alright.”

Marty wasn't so tentative after that.

When Rust strained against the hold he could feel all of the fluttering muscles along his ribs pull tight, and when Marty pressed him back down Rust felt like he was lit up from the inside by an electric hum. The frequency of it set slantwise against Rust's hallucination, like twisting a kalidoscope, what had looked like one thing morphing and resolving into something else entirely. Rust gasped, ragged, which was sure to be entirely too good for Marty's ego, but Rust couldn't help it as he stared at the -

\- fractal fields of cane that stretched out and folded back in on themselves forever, roots that twisted down into the soil and then out to become endless braided bayou waterways that were teeming with life, alligators and bobcats and red-winged blackbirds whose red shoulder patches were nothing like the red of blood and were everything like the red of brake lights and cherry slurpees and endless loss. The -

\- trees. The sky. The dog. The weeds. The -

\- oil slick threads that knit themselves back together, searching to one another through the emptiness of the tear in Rust's reality with a blind intelligence that Rust could comprehend only in flashes. The -

\- room behind Marty, made whole once more.

Rust blinked at the edge of the couch, and said “It's not rope.”

“Hmm?”

“That he's strangling them with. It's a cotton cord. Type that's used in upholstery.”

“Well, okay.” Marty said, still in that post-,coital haze that Rust had never understood. “We'll get after it tomorrow.”

Marty let go of Rust's wrists, almost like it was an afterthought. Rust brought his hands down to where he could see the bruises that we're already starting to color up into blotchy purple bracelets. Proof that something, at least, was real.

**Author's Note:**

> I write everything on my phone so hopefully there aren't any terrible autocorrect errors. Kudos and comments are loved!


End file.
